5 Side Effects To Modern Inventions

In the past couple of decades, the world has seen a monumental explosion in the technology domain. It’s not just that now we have touchscreen phones all of sudden or almost sentient little robots that are silently plotting to overcome humankind and keep us in a zoo. Many other discoveries in a variety of fields have revolutionized everything we know: in medicine, in beauty, in the food industry, in science and yada yada. Most, if not all, of these astonishing creations have been made with nothing but the best of intentions and with the hopes that, perhaps, they will prove useful and they will aid us in making life just a little bit easier. While that’s partly true, the wonders of modern technology don’t come without a price. Out of a whole ocean of available content and creations, we chose 5 Side Effects To Modern Inventions that might make you wonder whether spawning them was a good idea.

1. The Snooze Button

Alarms are the enemy of every person who is socially forcibly ejected out of the comfort of their bed in order to spend hours doing various tasks in exchange for rewards (money, basically; unless you’re in school, in which case, condolences). Which is why, in order to counterattack the brutality of it, humankind decided to invent the snooze button. Simply pressing it will silence the malevolent jazzy tune that’s trying to split us away from the homely activity of sleeping, and will secure us a few more minutes together with the Sandman. However, this seems to be only making things worse.

Whenever we wake up, our bodies are the stage of several chemical processes that involve reducing the amount of serotonin in our bloodstream and boosting dopamine. Our ever so fragile bodies are constructed in a way that allows us to learn the pattern of our sleep schedule, to the point when we’ll be able to naturally wake up at a certain hour without having to rely on naturetunes.mp3 blasting through our heads. But since there is basically no one on Earth who consistently goes to bed and wakes up at the exact same hours, it turns out that we do need naturetunes.mp3 after all. Whenever we hit the snooze button, drift back to the land of dreams and wake up again, our bodies are forced to retain and release said substances again, and again, and again.

Given that we basically turn into a bank of substance transactions every morning, there’s no surprise that we wake up cranky and ready to commit murder. Next time you think about snoozing, consider that as difficult is may sound, immediately waking up will be more beneficial for your mind and body.

2. Automatic Hand Dryers

How they affect us: by basically projecting every bacteria in the world in our faces.

How many trees do we have to kill in order to properly wipe our hands after the sanitizing process of washing our hands? That’s what someone, somewhere, sometime must have thought when they came up with the automatic hand dryers. Tired of committing flora genocide, humans hammered on the walls of every respectable bathroom a box that blows hot hair on our hands once every two seconds, by constantly shutting down and forcing us to bend and flex around it in our attempts to find where those annoying sensors are hidden.

However, even though trees are probably joyously living their tree lives without the worry of being butchered for the sake of human biology, we shouldn’t hop in on the celebration too soon. According to some people who decided that analyzing hand dryers is something they genuinely want to do, these automatic boxes do more harm than good. By blowing air, they basically suck in all the bacteria scattered around the bathroom into a foul tornado that rapidly grows thanks to the warmth of the jet, and all of it gets catapulted on our frontal body parts.

3. Pain Relievers

How they affect us: by essentially sucking all the joy out of us until we’re left with the emotional range of a cucumber.

You know what they say about emotional pain being a much harsher thing to withstand than physical one? Oh, man, wouldn’t it be the best thing ever if we could dull out our broken hearts as quickly as we can recover from accidentally grabbing tightly on a steaming hot curling iron? Good news: we can.

Nathan DeWall from the University of Kentucky conducted in 2009 an experiment that showed that Tylenol, everyone’s number one go-to choice for all pill popping needs, is actually excellent at easing the pain of social rejection, too. This is essentially saying that a good dose of Tylenol is going to help both with the pain of landing on your face after an unsuccessful back flip into a frozen lake, and the pain of having your friends film it and post it on YouTube.

So, what’s so bad about this? What’s bad is that it’s been recently proven that by dulling out our emotions, we are also alienating our positive ones, making us less susceptible to random explosions of overwhelming glee. Come to think of it, in the long run, is mending a broken heart worth not being able to fully enjoy a Cats Doing Adorable Things video?

4. Cellphones

How they affect us: how don’t they affect us?

Cellphones are considered to be the number one obstacle in human evolution, the spawns of the lowest layers of Hell. If you thought that there hasn’t been an aspect about our favorite portable devices that hasn’t been turned upside down and demonized in every possible way, think again. Apparently, cellphones are incredibly evil even when we aren’t using them.

The journal Social Psychology thought that there wasn’t enough cellphone bashing in the world, so they conducted an experiment to further prove their cause. They brought in a classroom several undergrad psych students, told them to solve some math exercises and had the teacher randomly leave the class and “accidentally” leave behind his cellphone. The aftermath was that the students performed worse during their math exercises, because if it weren’t for the cellphone, they would have definitely emerged from this experiment infallible Pythagorean masterminds.

It seems that the simple presence of a cellphone subconsciously makes us think of all the social media and conversations we are being kept away from. Fair enough. Also, if you’re thinking of trying to keep your phone as far away as possible from you from now on and opt for a set of Bluetooth headphones, it seems like the alternative is just as distracting, if not more.

5. Workout Clothes

How they affect us: by making us reek like a sack of rotten eggs forgotten in a dumpster for thirty years.

Let’s be honest here, no matter how honorable and beneficial physical activity is, it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing thing out there. By the end of a workout routine, most of us are left breathlessly trying to stop our lungs from getting ejected out of our chests, and drenched in sweat from areas we didn’t even know could sweat. Believe it or not, it could be worse.

When deciding what outfit you’re going to wear when basking in the glory of body toning activities, you might want to leave synthetic clothes out of the equation. Researchers from the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology took it upon themselves to unleash the world’s foulest smell by having people dressed in various fabrics exercise. They took the clothes, left them in a distant corner overnight to capture the fearful odor as best as they could, then had a probably harshly underpaid employee sniff them and rank them in a hierarchy of filthiness. The results showed that the clothes made from a material such as polyester were the winners.

Turns out that, ultimately, no matter how ugly looking a cotton tracksuit might be, at least it won’t leave a trail of inhuman scents behind you when you leave the gym.

Alright, maybe these side effects are nothing worrisome or of exceptional proportions. But can you imagine what all of them combined can do to us? Regardless, it’s not news that every good thing must come for a price. After all, the world revolves around the concept of equivalent exchange. And this is how we got 5 Side Effects To Modern Inventions.